Industrial IT espionage: no silver bullet

Alan Cane

Financial Times

25 April 2012

PA’s Alan Phillips, an IT security expert, is quoted in the Financial Times The Connected Business special report on cyber security. Alan talks about industrial digital espionage. Increasingly, criminal gangs with access to technological expertise are selling their ill-gotten gains.

Alan comments: “Industrial espionage has moved into the digital age and we have seen companies do things that are illegal to achieve their objectives”

Alan goes on to give an example to illustrate this. “Two companies involved in a legal dispute. Company A, based in Russia, sent a custom-crafted email to an individual in company B with an entertaining link – a horoscope – which created a vulnerability giving access to all the information on the individual’s computer.

“A systems administrator, checking the altered behaviour of the machine, logged on using his password. That gave company A access to the entire network. The scam was only detected when Company B noticed that its rival was responding to its legal initiatives rather more rapidly than would have been possible without prior knowledge.”